A preview of My Beloved Brontosaurus

NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Brian Switek's My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs (Scientific American / Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2013). The preview consists of chapter 7, "Birds with Feathers," in which Switek discusses the once-seemingly-intractable question of the color of dinosaurs: "The key to the whole puzzle is a simple, beautiful fact that has irrevocably changed the way that we look at dinosaur lives. It is simply this: birds are dinosaurs."

Reviewing My Beloved Brontosaurus for Nature, Xu Xing writes, "[Switek] offer[s] a compelling mixture of reliable infor­mation, personal experiences and thoughts, anecdotes about paleontological research and even science philosophy, delivered in a breezy and engaging style ... [he] paints a comprehensive picture of how our understanding of dinosaur evo­lution gradually advances ... Switek has succeeded in covering a wide range of inter­esting topics in dinosaur palaeontology with infectious enthusiasm.”